Posts Tagged ‘News’

To many New Yorkers getting ready for work, the New York One channel is as important as their early morning cup of coffee or that first cigarette. Sure, it mainly just broadcasts weather reports 24/7 but that’s part of its charm.

The best part of NY1 however is not the never-ending weather and traffic bulletins – it’s actually the morning “In the Papers” segment read by the caustic and loveable Pat Kiernan. So what if all he does is read out the best stories from the New York Times, Post and News? It saves us the trouble.

Now Kiernan has gone national with his new website PatsPapers.Com. Working with part-time editors in New York and Europe and a producer in New York, he will publish an e-mail digest and a webcast during the downtime in his NY1 shift.

Beauties queuing up to be America’s Next Top Model flipped out and began a stampede when a car overheated in Manhattan this week. The casting call had attracted thousands of aspiring model/reality show personalities to the Park Central Hotel on West 55th Street.

But, as the New York Daily News reports, “An overheating car triggered a stampede of catwalk-craving cuties,” while the Post adds, “The situation spiraled further out of control when a man hurtled over a barricade and slapped one of the girls in line.” Perhaps showing why they are models and not rocket scientists, the girls feared the car would explode, while others screamed that the man had a gun.

A woman waiting for her chance told the News, “The girls were running like it was 9/11 part two. I feared for my life.” Ultimately, three people were arrested for disorderly conduct and inciting a riot and six people were injured.

Usual Suspects star Gabriel Byrne has gone to war on “dumbos” who want to block the view from his luxury New York apartment. Byrne, 58, lives with his two kids Jack and Romy in a gigantic brownstone apartment in Brooklyn, New York, and is just a stone’s throw from the Broadway theatres where he performs and the set of his US television show, In Treatment.

But developers have announced plans to erect a giant skyscraper in the area where he lives which is affectionately known as “DUMBO” – short for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Dubliner Byrne believe the 18-storey building will block beautiful views of the Brooklyn Bridge and just doesn’t fit the community of converted four- and five-storey warehouses.

Raged Byrne: “This huge building will dwarf the bridge on the Brooklyn side, causing irreparable damage to the bridge’s singular and majestic presence.” He submitted his bitter objections to a city planning meeting last week.

Telly shrink Gabriel Byrne recently found himself an unpaid job – teaching Frasier’s crusty old dad to sound more Irish. Byrne, who plays a psychiatrist in edgy series In Treatment, stepped in to help when his veteran co-star John Mahoney was cast in Colin McPherson‘s play “The Seafarer,” on Broadway.

Mahoney (pictured above) – best known for playing the grumpy dad in another TV shrink show, Frasier – is a proud Irish American himself but he had no idea how to do a Dublin accent. In between takes for In Treatment, Mahoney would chat with Dublin-born Byrne paying close attention to the lilt of his voice. Byrne even taped himself reading lines from Mahoney’s script of “The Seafarer.”

“I have a lot of Irish in me but this really helps,” says Mahoney, who was born in England and had an Irish grandfather but lost his accent when he emigrated to the US. Referring to his role in the play, at New York’s Steppenwolf Theatre, Mahoney says: “I play a filthy old drunk, recently blind, chronically hung over.

A blockbuster wartime bio-pic faces the axe – after it was revealed the New Yorker who wrote it made the whole story up! Oscar winner Richard Dreyfuss and Irish starlet Sarah Bolger were set to make “The Fence” – based on an autobiography by Herman Rosenblat.

In the movie, Dublin-born beauty Bolger plays Roma, a young girl who forms a bond with teenage Nazi concentration camp victim Rosenblat after she keeps him alive by tossing him breadcrumbs and apples over the barbed wire fence.

However, Rosenblat, who went on to marry Roma following a chance meeting years later in New York, has now shockingly confessed he concocted the information in his book, “Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love that Survived.”

Retired New York telly repairman Herman, whose bogus story has now been scrapped by publishers, apologised this week, saying: “I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people. I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make good in this world. In my dreams, Roma will always throw me an apple, but I now know it is only a dream.”

Even chat show queen Oprah Winfrey was taken in by the hoax. Oprah who hosted Rosenblat and his wife, Roma Radzicki Rosenblat, on her show twice, called their romance “the single greatest love story” she had encountered in her 22 years on the show.

He’s one of the most popular political figures of all time, but a new book will trash the reputation of America’s favourite president John F Kennedy and portray him as a sex fiend.

The bombshell new book “American Adulterer,” by British writer Jed Mercurio, ignores Kennedy’s political accomplishments and focuses instead on his daily addiction to illicit sex sessions with beautiful starlets like Marilyn Monroe, Angie Dickinson and Judith Campbell Exner. And the page turner, billed as a work of fiction, is set to spark outrage among the powerful Kennedy Clan, who are regarded as America’s own royal family.

Publishers Simon & Schuster say American Adulterer, released this July, is an “explosive retelling of Kennedy’s White House years,” a period in which “we see him at his worst, as a compulsive philanderer. “Kennedy had an uncontrollable and unrelenting appetite for sexual adventure.”

JFK’s daughter Caroline Kennedy, who is hoping to follow in her father’s illustrious footsteps by becoming a New York senator, has so far not commented on the forthcoming book.

He’s been on our screens for five decades – but Irish actor Stephen Rea says the characters he plays never gets any nookie! The closest he came to getting lucky was in his Oscar-nominated movie The Crying Game and the female ‘love interest’ in that film turned out to be a cross-dressing MAN!

However, Rea – one of the busiest stars in Hollywood – claims he is happy never getting the girl. “Can you imagine having to do all that sex in a film?” says 62-year-old Rea. “Sex in movies is not fun. There’s a lot of people watching, your butt is in the air, it’s not the most fun. You will be much happier if you don’t see my butt in the air, believe me.”

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Welcome to the web's newest source for all things Gotham. We're the curio-blog Batman would read ...if he could. Enjoy our quirky news feed, as it casts its weary eye over America, and help us in our bid to make Gotham City the official nickname for New York.